


coasts demanding shipwreck

by beautify



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 09:07:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17557451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beautify/pseuds/beautify
Summary: Wash was Maine's friend whether Maine liked it or not.





	coasts demanding shipwreck

He spent a lot of time with Maine, spent a lot of time thinking about Maine, had dreams about what was behind that faceplate sometimes but tried not to think about that too hard. It made sense because they had coupled up in the field and now it followed them around, sort of, in the lockers rooms and in the mess at breakfast, which Wash didn’t usually eat, and it wasn’t like Maine ate, or at least, not when Wash could see.

He ate breakfast now, because often the drills cut through the day and late into the evening. He went to bed smelling like gun oil and sweat and exhaust from six different engines, but nobody could tell because there was nothing else to smell. He slept in the room next to Maine. They had transferred him there two weeks after he had made the cut, when they had figured that Wash did something for Maine, that Maine without Wash was not quite as good as Maine with Wash, especially now that Maine was used to him being there. Or at least that was the only reason Wash could think of. He did not think they had transferred him because he liked Maine and they wanted him to have a friend.

It was strange because Wash didn’t think he’d be there without Maine, and he didn’t know if that was a good thing. He had nowhere else to go, but if he hadn’t made it into the project, he would not have disappeared.

Sometimes they went planetside and Wash looked around for places he might have fit in. He could have been a bodyguard, except he was neurotic and had a baby fat face if he shaved, which he did. He could have worked a diner although he couldn’t cook, but it wasn’t like that had ever stopped anyone else. If he hadn’t joined the army, if he wasn’t so nervous all the time, if he hadn’t smashed that boy’s face in a mirror, then what? It was a thought experiment that did not lead to much.

There were other things that he liked about going planetside. He liked the smell of grass cuttings and animals and oily plants in the rain, things you did not smell on the ship because they were never there. The MOI could have easily sustained a cat on board but they preferred lifeforms which understood the meaning of the words DO NOT. Like Carolina. And York, although he pretended not to. And planetside, nobody wore their power suits. When Wash saw people, he saw their faces too. He’d been on the MOI for only three weeks and yet that seemed wrong, like he was seeing something he shouldn’t have. He had adjusted very quickly. He supposed that was what made him a survivor. That, and the power suit.

Wash could guess why Maine never went planetside, and for some reason it seemed wrong to leave him there, but Wash went anyway. He wanted to smell the grass cuttings, he wanted to sit in diners even if he did not want to eat, he wanted to tag along with Ohio, and then later, when he was good enough, Connie and North. When he came back Maine did not seem to take much note of his return. Cat, thought Wash.

Ohio had not returned at all. Maybe she’d gotten a mission assignment after all. “Five things nobody ever tells Wash,” said Connie, smiling. And then Wash forgot all about Ohio, because it was nice, and he was in a good mood, and he was in the single digits now and not much else seemed to matter.

Later, he felt bad about that.

 

 

So now Ohio was gone, and it was just Wash and Maine. There was nobody left to call him David.

“Are we friends?” he asked Maine, one day, unprovoked. Maine acted as though he had not heard, and went on crawling in the undergrowth. Out in the forest it was damp and soft, and the soil underfoot seemed to give a little more with each move they made. They were out in the field, alone together as they often were. “People think we’re friends. Did you know that?”

The thing about Maine was that unlike anyone else he was incapable of telling Wash to shut up. The other thing about Maine was that, also unlike anyone else, it was not unlike him to physically shut people like Wash up. But he never did. Wash had been wary of Maine at first but now he was wary to be without him. There was good reason to separate the two of them, if you happened to want either of them dead.

“I don’t mind that you never talk,” said Wash quietly, feeling dizzy. It sounded more like a sigh than a sentence. He had gone three days without food and his power suit was struggling. Navigation systems were offline and they had been crawling for days, if the changing of the light was anything to go by.

They did this often. It was a good simulation. Like lifting a weight: once you finally put it down, everything else became so much easier.

Rain fell from the sky. The soil dissolved into mud. Someone besides Maine wanted Wash to stop talking, which was not unusual.

When the simulation ended Maine looked lost for a moment. It always took him a little while to remember where he was. That could have been a side effect of getting shot in the throat, or it could have just been Maine, the kind of person that he was.

“We tend to run these simulations in pairs,” the counselor had once said. “So that you aren’t alone when you resurface.”

Probably that put all kinds of dubious reinforcements in place. Hold on to your friend and you will make it out alive. Wash wondered if Internals thought of them as friends, or just partners, or just Maine plus a wad of gum stuck to his shoe. If nothing else Wash liked to be the reason Maine was not alone. If nothing else Wash thought that he was Maine’s friend, and he was good for it.

 

 

Later, much later, after the project had gone down in flames and it was up to Wash to put out the last of the fire, it was difficult not to think about York, about Delta, the changes in his log when Wash had found him.

 _I would like to stay with Agent York_. At first Wash had not understood. He’d thought Delta had malfunctioned, and in a sense, Delta had.

How could he put something like that down? A part of him couldn’t stand to put it down. No one else was left to remember, and if he ever managed to forget it would be as though it had never happened, never mattered. You just had to care about things like that forever or else you erased them, made something into nothing. If he didn’t forget, if he wasn’t fine, then he might have inched towards justice.

 

 

It was not the first time they had walked through the desert together, but he had not known that it would be the last.

He hadn’t seen Maine in a while, and things were very different now. There was no project. Maine wasn’t even called Maine.

“I never knew your real name,” said Wash, bolder now than he was before. They were now operating on the basis of a truce rather than a partnership.

Maine grunted at him. There were sounds he made that Wash did not understand, and Wash did not know if that was because they had been separated, or because Maine was not actually trying to talk, or because that sound was Maine’s name and it just didn’t mean anything to Wash.

“My name is David.” He kept trudging on as if it didn’t matter, looking ahead while Maine lumbered behind him, a sleeping Doc on his back. “I always wanted you to know that.”

Maine made another noise that Wash didn’t recognise. The thing about names was that they were just names. They didn’t translate. They weren’t even really words. It was just a sound that belonged to you. It was stupid to tell Maine his name because it wasn’t even a sound Maine could make, although later when they were camped out in an old, abandoned outpost, Wash thought he noticed him trying. It was stupid, but it pleased him, to think that it had struck Maine.

And then he thought about what he had said to Ohio. _Just don’t call me David, okay? These guys take that stuff pretty seriously_.

Ohio, Oh, Vera, his friend. She was gone. He would probably never see her again. He was alone in the desert with a man who could not talk to him, trying to make amends. He imagined she was doing somewhat better, but it would not have surprised him if she was instead in a tundra, doing more or less the same thing. She had been the only person he’d ever known who’d had even worse luck than him. He had liked her.

Later when Maine was asleep and it was his turn to keep watch, Wash thought about the summers he had spent at home as a kid. He had read comics and he had watched a lot of TV, he’d liked to go down to the beach and collect seashells, never as many as his sisters managed to find and never as pretty, the dread of school looming over him all the while. He’d climbed a lot of trees, fallen out of just as many, skinned his knees, cried a little, had his mom spray awful antiseptic on it ’til his knee turned yellow. He used to eat more mango than he ate worth of anything now.

These days he still skinned his knees but he also went partially blind now and then, got concussed, beat up, shot in the head, stabbed in the back, had broken most of his bones at one point or another, and of course he’d had artificial intelligence go and kill itself while it was in his head. Nobody sprayed him with antiseptic anymore. It was fine. He was alive, not well, alive, because he was very, very difficult to kill. As was his job.

The next evening, when they were cleaning their rifles and taking inventory, Maine said something that sounded like _listen_. In the desert there was not much to listen to, and you started to imagine things. If Wash stopped and listened carefully he could hear the wind on the sand, the sound of his breathing, the low hum of his power suit. Maine made a strange sound.

“What is it?” said Wash quietly. It dawned on him that he was terrible at treating his enemies like enemies.

Maine growled, as though he were trying to sound something out. A few more, and then he shook his head. Defeat. Suddenly Wash felt the full force of his suffering. He felt terrible, as if he had done something unforgivable. Here he was, the only person in the world who had understood a single word that Maine had said since his throat injury, and now when Maine wanted to tell him something, when for the first time there was no one else to hear, Wash did not understand.

“I’m sorry,” said Wash, feeling helpless. He took off his helmet and put it down in the sand. The night air was cool and there were no more heat mirages in the distance. He rubbed at his face, feeling all at once too old and like a child. Maine tilted his head at him. Their prisoner was asleep somewhere inside, but the two of them sat out in the open air, quiet and peaceful and safe. Almost like they were friends.


End file.
